A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Chaikin

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I’ve been fascinated by space and space travel since I was a kid. I used to have a copy of Our Universe, and it became one of my most-read, most dog-eared books, since I would pore over it any chance I had. When I was browsing Audible looking for my next audiobook, I stumbled across this one, and figured it would be a good way to pass the time driving to and from work. It wound up not just being a good choice, but the best choice.

Chaikin approaches the story of the missions in an interesting way, focusing on whatever makes the next mission different from the next. He covers in great details the minutiae of the journey to and from the Moon with Apollo 8, the first mission to complete the trip, but by the time he gets to Apollo 11, he skips those parts and focuses solely on the landing and the moon walks. Apollo 13 is covered in great detail, since the mission was one of survival, not of achievement, and the later missions were covered by their moon walks and goals, which grew with each subsequent mission.

The author takes a risk by writing about the Apollo missions in order, since Apollo 1 resulted in the fire that killed three astronauts. It’s a downer of a story, and isn’t the best one to capture the hope and glory that surrounded later missions. Still, this was how the Apollo program happened in real life, and the program opened with this tragedy, which is tragic not just due to the loss of three lives, but due to what it represented to the program, the organization, and even the country. The loss of the mission was as huge as the loss of life, and Chaikin captures that well in his telling of the story.

Chaikin writes about the astronauts and other key figures of Mission Control and the program overall as they become relevant to the story. He tends to focus on their characters, touching on other related people in their lives only briefly. He mentions that one astronaut from the early mission had a wife who turned to alcohol to help deal with the stress of being an astronaut’s wife, but he doesn’t mention how — or if — that was something ever resolved. Chaikin keeps his focus on the astronauts themselves. This makes sense based on his source material (he interviewed all of the astronauts to research the book), but at the same time, these are important facts about the story that are never discussed beyond bringing them to our attention. Wives, children, and support staff are only mentioned when it’s relevant to the astronauts’ stories.

One thing that threw me about the narrative was how Chaikin would write about events from the past, as if they were happening at that moment. He would sometimes use words like “yesterday” or “tomorrow” or “later” to describe a different event, even though the rest of the story was told in the past tense. It was an odd choice (why not “the previous day” or “the next day”?), and it’s not something that happened all the time, but it was frequent enough to raise my eyebrows.

Bronson Pinchot narrated the audiobook, and I don’t think there’s a better narrator they could have chosen for the book. When the story gets tense, he narrates with excitement and breathlessness; when the story tells of the astronauts’ reactions to the grandeur of space and the Moon, his voice becomes soft and awestruck; when the story covers life-and-death decisions that must be made quickly, Pinchot tells us so quickly, frenetically. He doesn’t just tell the story, he performs it, and I’ve about decided that I will listen to any audiobook if Pinchot is narrating it.

The book concludes with an epilogue that shares what the Apollo astronauts did with their lives after going to the moon. It’s an enlightening finish, as some of them became religious, others dropped out of space aeronautics all together, and others dropped out of the public life all together. Only one of the astronauts would stay with NASA long enough to participate in the space shuttle missions, while the bulk of them moved on to business ventures as wide-ranging as real estate to becoming CEOs. It helps to show how grounded the astronauts were, and how their trips to the moon were as much of a job to them as the rest of us have to our own daily grind.

A Man on the Moon is a book for anyone fascinated with space or history or engineering or dedication. We’re nearing the 50th anniversary of the first moon walk, and when we reach that date, it will have been forty-seven years since we last sent someone to the Moon. By then, it will be forty-seven years since we sent a person to any other object in our solar system. As Chaikin writes in his afterword, “How could the most futuristic thing humans have ever done be so far in the past?”

"'I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'"